Frets on Fire 1.3

Frets on Fire is a musical game that challenges your dexterity by having you play guitar music on your computer keyboard. When you begin playing the game you will chose a song. The image of a guitar bridge will appear on the screen in the foreground with the body and neck of the guitar disappearing into the distance. You will see five colored blocks representing different positions on your keyboard. As the notes scroll on the screen, you'll hit the correct key while tapping the "enter" button to play the sound. If you do it correctly the song will sound just like the original; mistakes are greeted by a distorted guitar wail and then silence.

The game comes with a few good classic songs and each one has graduated levels of difficulty. After you run through these, you might want to go to the online forum and grab a few tunes made by other players or even share your own creations.

You can create your own songs with the built-in song editor, which you'll learn fairly quickly with the entertaining tutorials. If you don't like trial and error, the tutorial's host, Jurgen Guntherswarchzhaffenstrassen, will walk you through the game.

Frets on Fire is child-safe and rated "Everyone" but when downloading user-created songs, you should examine them before letting younger children play them. This aural game is a great way to teach music and dexterity to young people or for anyone to just have a good time.

Guitar Hero Available for: windowsmaclinuxunixjavaGuitar Hero first came out in 2005 and has been quite successful. The idea behind the game is that the player is a guitarist competing to be accurate in "playing" the music using a controller shaped... Read more